Brian Bunting, 1975
Moses Kotane, South African Revolutionary
2
The National Question
Kotane entered the South African political arena at a time when controversy was raging over the
nature of the South African revolution and the relationship between the national and class
struggles, precipitated by the adoption of the famous 'Native Republic' resolution by the 6th
Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow in 1928. To understand the nature of the
contribution which Kotane was to make in the coming years, it is necessary to review the
arguments which were being hotly debated by the protagonists at the time.
The national question had been discussed by both Marx and Engels in terms of the political
situation of their day - a period when capitalism was at its height and about to expand and
transform itself into the worldwide complex of imperialism. The early writings of Lenin and Stalin
contain dissertations on the national question which view it as one of the phenomena
accompanying the development of the capitalist system.
In his 1914 thesis on The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Lenin wrote: "Throughout the
world the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national
movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the
home market, and there must be politically united territories whose populations speak a single
language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in
literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements
. . . Therefore the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states,
under which these requirements of capitalism are best satisfied . . . The self-determination of
nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the
formation of an independent national state."
But what constitutes a nation?
In his famous treatise on Marxism and the National Question written in 1913, Stalin said: "A nation
is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological
make-up manifested in a community of culture . . . It must be emphasised that none of the above
characteristics is by itself sufficient to define a nation. On the other hand, it is sufficient for a single
one of these characteristics to be absent and the nation ceases to be a nation."
Stalin also wrote in this same treatise: "It goes without saying that a nation, like every other
historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end."
As with nations, so with the theory of national liberation, the Marxist laws of change and
development operate. Theory and practice are interrelated and interact upon one another.
"The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a
small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual
concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so it must be rejected." - Lenin, On the
National Pride of the Great Russians, 1916.
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The Bolshevik Party not only proclaimed the right of nations to self-determination but also put its
policies into effect when it came to power in 1917. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland
exercised the right to secession from Russia and became independent states. A number of
independent Soviet Republics were created which later joined together to form the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics on December 30, 1922, regarding the creation of the U.S.S.R. as the only
guarantee that the various peoples who had been colonised and oppressed under the former
Tsarist regime would have the freedom and the power to exercise the right to self-determination.
The U.S.S.R. was not imposed on the various nations and national groups by the power of the
Russian majority, but was a union voluntarily and freely entered into by the various contracting
parties.
As Stalin explained: "Under present international conditions, under the conditions of capitalist
encirclement, not a single Soviet republic taken alone can regard itself as secure against economic
exhaustion and military destruction on the part of world imperialism.
"Hence, in isolation, the existence of the various Soviet republics is uncertain and unstable,
because of the menace to their existence offered by the capitalist states. The joint interests of the
Soviet Republics in the matter of defence, in the first place, the restoration of the productive forces
shattered during the war, in the second place, and the fact that the Soviet Republics which are rich
in food must come to the aid of the Soviet Republics which are poor in food, in the third place, all
imperatively dictate the political union of the various Soviet republics as the only means of
escaping imperialist bondage and national oppression. Having liberated themselves from their
'own' and 'foreign' bourgeoisie, the national Soviet republics can defend their existence and defeat
the combined forces of imperialism only by amalgamating themselves into a close political union,
or not at all."6
The formation of the Soviet Union by the first All-Union Congress of Soviets on December 30,
1922, was a triumphant vindication of the Marxist theory on the national question, and opened up
an era of the many-sided and harmonious development of the Soviet peoples, welding them into a
massive force which has transformed the balance of power on a global scale, prised loose the grip
of the imperialists and opened the way for the emergence and development of all the formerly
subject peoples in all continents of the world.
It is on this theoretical foundation, together with its successful realisation in practice wherever it has
been applied, that the South African Communist Party bases its conviction that the national
oppression of the black peoples of South Africa can be eliminated and the national aspirations of
all section of the people fully realised within the framework of a single, integrated South African
state based on non-racialism, democracy and full equality.
Marxist theories on the national question, and in particular the practical experience of the Soviet
Union in applying those theories, were of special significance for South Africa, with its racially
mixed population. In 1921, the year of the foundation of the Communist Party of South Africa, the
population total was revealed by the census taken that year to be 6,927,000, comprising 1,521,000
Whites, 4,697,000 Africans, 525,000 Coloureds and 164,000 Asians. With the exception of a few
thousand blacks mainly in the Cape but including also a handful in Natal, who fulfilled the
educational and financial requirements of the constitution and had gone through the often
troublesome process of registering on the voters' roll, the franchise was the monopoly of the
whites, who alone exercised effective power. Thus the South African situation was not the same as
that in the Soviet Union, where the Great Russian majority had to take into account the aspirations
of a variety of smaller nations and national groups. In South Africa, by contrast, the problem which
confronted the socialist movement from the outset was how to smash the colour bar, which both by
law and custom effectively prevented the black majority from exercising any democratic rights,
acquiring education and skills, enjoying equal rights and opportunities and sharing equally the
benefits of the economic development of the country. By the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936 the
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Africans were even forbidden to own or acquire land in 87 per cent of the land area of the country;
and restriction on access to the land was extended to Coloureds and Asians by the Group Areas
Act of 1950 passed after the Nationalist Government came to power in 1948.
Black political organisations existed before the socialist movement came into being. The Natal
Indian Congress was formed by Gandhi in 1894, the African Political Organisation (APO) in 1902,
the National Congress (later renamed the African National Congress) in 1912; and there were
other bodies. But most of these were sectional in their approach, lacking in both ideology and
strategy, with a purview which did not extend beyond the immediate interests of the group for
whom they spoke. The African National Congress (as we shall refer to it hereafter) did not even
have a constitution until 1919, the first draft having been rejected by the annual conference of 19l5.
In its early years, the ANC shrank from demanding full equality for all the peoples of South Africa,
and perhaps its greatest achievement was that it set out to unite all sections of the African people,
it rejected tribal or ethnic division, and it proposed to take action. - at that time essentially non-
violent - to promote the interests of the African people and obtain redress for their grievances.
Though it undoubtedly stimulated African national consciousness, its approach was reformist and
gradualist .
It was not until socialist organisations emerged in South Africa that it was possible to apply in
practice the ideology of Marxism to the solution of the national problem. And here it is important to
bear in mind the fact that these organisations did not spring into life fully fashioned with theory and
practice to match the needs of the time. The most important of them, the International Socialist
League, was formed in 1915 when a section of the white Labour Party broke away from the parent
body over the issue of the war. Not all the members of the ISL were Marxists; not all of them
indeed were international socialists; many of them thought of socialism only in terms of the white
workers who, they thought, must constitute the vanguard of the socialist revolution in South Africa.
The more far-sighted of the members of the International Socialist League realised that socialism
for South Africa could not be restricted to the whites but must include all races. In October 1915 the
first secretary of the ISL, David Ivon Jones, wrote in an article in The International on the 'Parting of
the Ways': “An internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the Native working
class is capable of claiming will be a sham. One of the justifications for our withdrawal from the
Labour Party is that it gives us untrammelled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with
the great and fascinating problem of the native. If the League deal resolutely in consonance with
Socialist principles with the native question, it will succeed in shaking South African capitalism to its
foundations. Then and not till then, shall we be able to talk about the South African Proletariat in
our International relations. Not till we free the native can we hope to free the white . . .”
Two months later Jones returned to the subject again in the International: “Slaves to a higher
oligarchy, the white workers of South Africa themselves in turn batten on a lower slave class, the
native races. Himself kicked by his Capitalist masters, the 'correct' and accepted attitude towards
the 'nigger' is to kick him, to, teach him his place, and to stand no impudence (meaning
'independence'). Gingerly attempts to show him that in the extension of freedom for the native lies
the only salvation of the white worker invariably aroused storms of execration. And thus has the
South African Labour movement grown up, more intolerant towards the native slave than any
working class in the world, and consequently more parasitical than any other. To such a
movement, talk of the international unity of the working class could never arouse sincere response
among a rank and file so placed . . . Can we talk of the cause of the Workers in which the cries of
the most despairing and the claims of the most enslaved are spurned and disregarded . . . The new
movement will break the bounds of Craft and race and sex .. . It will be wide as humanity . . .
Another Who early advanced the claims of the black workers was S.P. Bunting, who in the issue of
the International of February 18, 1916, wrote an article headed: "Workers of the World Unite" in
which he declared: "The solidarity of Labour fails the moment it is divided on colour, race. . . or
creed . . .”
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The Labour Party and the trade union movement with which it was associated consisted almost
entirely of white workers. So did the ISL when it first came into existence. When Jones spoke of the
"we" and the "us', who were now free to deal with "the great and fascinating problem of the Native",
he was thinking in terms of "we white socialists" and. he was still reflecting the prevailing white
attitude that the Africans constituted a “problem”. This was because up to this time in South African
history there was hardly any record of black political industrial or working class organisation or
action within the framework of the modem sector of the economy which had made any impact on
(white) public opinion. In the beginning the ISL had no black members.
There was a tug of war inside the ISL between those who saw the need for pioneer socialist work
amongst the black workers, and those who felt the only way forward was to convert more white
workers to their way of thinking. At the first national conference of the ISL in Johannesburg on
January 9, 1916, a "petition of rights" for the African worker was introduced by Bunting, who
moved: "That this League affirm that the emancipation of the working class requires the abolition of
all forms of Native indenture, compound and passport systems; and the lifting of the Native worker
to the political and industrial status of the white."
In his biography of S.P. Bunting, Edward Roux writes: “This did not meet with the unanimous
support of the conference. No one openly expressed race prejudice or denied that the black man
was entitled to freedom. But there was an attempt to avoid a specific Native programme by
asserting that 'there was no Native problem, only a worker's problem'. An amendment by Dunbar to
this effect was lost. Colin Wade then got the last part of the motion changed to read 'and the lifting
of the Native wage worker to the political and industrial status of the white; meanwhile
endeavouring to prevent the increase (in numbers) of the Native wage workers, and to assist the
existing Native wage workers to free themselves from the wage system'." Though the motion was
passed, there was a minority of members who were doubtful of the place the black worker should
occupy in what they (the minority), consciously or unconsciously, accepted would continue to be a
white dominated society.11
But above all, absent from the thinking of even the majority in the ISL was any thought of the
independent contribution that could be made by the blacks to their own liberation or the creation of
a socialist South Africa. The motion, as passed, does not even aim at black liberation as such, but
only at the emancipation of the working class, in the ranks of whom the blacks were seen to be a
minority. There was no hint in the resolution that the black millions could be recruited as allies of
the white socialists in their fight for the new socialist order. Nor was there reflected in the motion
any understanding of the way in which the economic and social structure of South Africa was being
transformed by the destruction of the tribal way of life and the drawing Into th9 ranks of wage
labourers of millions upon millions of blacks who could no longer live off the land.
Marxist thinking on the national question had not yet reached South Africa. And the lack of
ideological clarity on the national question meant that the pioneer socialists were confronted with
an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, as Jones had pointed out, the racial attitudes of the
white workers, an aristocracy of labour, meant that "talk of the international unity of the working
class could never arouse sincere response". On the other hand, orthodox socialist theory, as
expressed by ISL Chairman W.H. (Bill) Andrews in his 1917 Provincial Council manifesto, declared
that it was "the imperative duty of the white workers to recognise their identity of interest with the
native worker as against their common masters . . . It is time for the white workers to deal with the
native as a man and a fellow worker and not as a chattel slave or serf. Only that way lies freedom
and justice for all."
This contradiction was to remain embedded in socialist thinking for many years to come, and
echoes of it are to be heard even today. Do black and white workers have a common class base
and common interests? Does the struggle for national liberation conflict with the struggle for
socialism? Can true equality for black and white be achieved short of the establishment of
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socialism and the abolition of class conflict? Who has not heard the sincere African patriot who
says: “We have the ANC, why do we also need a Communist Party?" Must the struggle for
socialism pass through two stages: 1. the bourgeois-democratic revolution which will end the
colour bar, and 2; the socialist revolution which will end all inequality, whether based on race or
class?
The ISL may have lacked an adequate theory on the national question, but it moved in the right
direction. It made contact with the black masses, sought co-operation with the ANC and, later, with
the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU); it brought black and white together on the
same platform and in various forms of political action; it formed the first industrial African trade
union, the Industrial; Workers of Africa in 1917. Step by step it moved forward 'towards a clearer
appreciation of the true nature of the problem which it had to tackle, and it is a tribute to its leaders
and the majority of its members that, isolated as they were at the southernmost tip of Africa, their
thinking as socialists kept pace with that at the revolutionary fountain-heads in Europe. They
welcomed the Russian revolution of 1917 and when the Comintern was formed they hastened to
apply for affiliation. At the January 1921 conference of the ISL a resolution outlining the nature of
work to be done among the Coloured and Native workers, introduced by Bunting, specifically
requested support for "bourgeois democratic liberation movements" among non-whites and backed
their demand for the vote, the right to organise, equal civil 'rights and the abolition of all
discriminatory legislation such as the pass laws, special taxes and restrictive labour practices.
Yet in his reply on behalf of the ISL to the Comintern, Communism in South Africa, only a few
months later (it was dated March 29, 1921), Ivon Jones referred disparagingly to the ANC as a
"small coterie of educated natives . . . satisfied with agitation for civil equality and political rights",
and contrasted them unfavourably with the Industrial Workers of Africa, despite the fact that this
organisation at that stage existed only on paper. Jones' report predicted that "the growing class
organisations of the natives will soon dominate or displace the Congress" an erroneous calculation
which was to be duplicated during the next decade in the Communist Party's relationship with the
ICU, which the Party believed would outlast the ANC.
In July 1921 the ISL joined with a number of other organisations to form the Communist Party of
South Africa, which became the South African affiliate of the Third International. In the six years of
their existence as a separate organisation, the South African socialists had made tremendous
strides. Yet still there was something missing. Although some black organisations had taken part in
preliminary discussions earlier in the year, they were not represented and there were no black
delegates present at the 'foundation conference of the CPSA, and the manifesto adopted by the
conference failed to identify the national question as a distinct item. Indeed the fight for equal rights
is barely referred to except by implication as an ingredient in the fight for socialism.
"For the immediate future", states the manifesto, "the main duty of the party and of every member
of it is to establish the widest and closest possible contact with workers of all ranks and races and
to propagate the Communist gospel amongst them, in the first instance among the industrial
masses, who must provide the 'storm. troops' of the revolution, and secondly among the rural
toilers. Even that path will not be smooth. Immediate repression in the form of raids, prosecutions,
mob attacks and bloodshed by 'Black (and Tan) Hundreds' or ‘White Guards’ may be looked for as
the propaganda is seen to be working among the submissive helot races whose enlightenment and
organisation the ruling class dreads above all. The Communists will therefore proceed neither
timorously nor tactlessly, losing no opportunity of demonstrating that, inasmuch as the cheap docile
labour is what attracts the world capitalist investor to South Africa, so its understanding of and
conscious entry into the working class movement is the most deadly blow South Africa can deal to
world capitalism.
"But propaganda 'is not enough' in these days of rapid change and action, and the party will be
alert to turn to the advantage of the Labour Movement wherever possible any phase of discontent
or disaffection, any opposition to imperialism, any indignation at the accepted 'skiet skiet' [shoot
5
shoot] native policy, any genuine revolt of the masses against tyranny; striving always to hasten,
sharpen and shorten the inevitable conflict, to guide and inspire the struggling workers in times of
stress and trial like the present, and generally to act as the revolutionary vanguard of the Labour
army of South Africa."
The international Communist movement, in a better position to assess developments throughout
the colonial world, and after the Russian revolution learning many valuable lessons from the
practical experience of the Communist Party in solving the national question in its own territory,
began to appreciate the anti-imperialist, revolutionary potential of the national struggle in the
colonial countries. In his "Report on the Tactics of the Russian Communist Party" presented to the
3rd Congress of the Communist International on July 5, 1921, Lenin, contesting the conventional
view of the Second International that the national movement was of secondary importance, wrote:
“But this is not so. It has undergone great change since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Millions and hundreds of millions, in fact the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe,
are now coming forward as independent, active and revolutionary factors. It is perfectly clear that in
the impending decisive battles in the world revolution, the movement of; the population of the
globe, Initially directed towards national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and
will perhaps play a much more revolutionary part than we expect."
Few white socialists saw this at the time. The great class struggles of the early decades of the
20th Century in South Africa had for the most part been waged by the white working class and their
unions for recognition, for status, for higher wages and better conditions, against the ruthless
rapacity of the mining and financial bosses backed by the force of government. The greatest
struggle was still to come - the mine strike of 1922 - in which the white workers directly challenged
the power of the Chamber of Mines and the State. Hundreds of white workers gave their lives in
these struggles, and there can be no denying their revolutionary content. After all, it was precisely
in the crucible of these intense class conflicts that the South African socialist movement as
represented in the ISL and the CPSA was forged.
By contrast, the latent power of the oppressed black peoples was yet to be manifested. True, tens
of thousands of Africans had been involved in strike action from time to time. The last fierce battle
of the Zulus against the white invaders had taken place at the beginning of the century. There were
frequent clashes between black and white, and blacks and the police. But for a variety of reasons
these struggles had not yet given birth to stable and powerful organisations capable of harnessing
black power. The black national organisations were unable, like the white bodies, to use the vote to
influence government policy. The African workers were unable to build strong unions because of
the operation of the migratory labour policy and the pass laws which kept the black population
perpetually on the move.
Thus many sincere white socialists, while accepting the principle of equal rights for all - and this
both the ISL and the CPSA were committed to, from the outset did not see work amongst the
blacks as a realistic alternative to work among the whites. The white unions, the Labour Party -
these were visible and concrete, and when (with the assistance of the Nationalist Party) they broke
the Smuts Government in 1924, no government from that day onwards was ever able to ignore
them. But the black national organisations, the ANC, the first African trade unions - these were
seen either as bourgeois and reformist organisations lacking a mass base, eschewing the path of
militant struggle and working instead by way of appeals, petitions and deputations; or as transient
and ephemeral bodies without substance, whose officials as often as not ran off with all the funds.
In his 1921 report to the Comintern on Communism in South Africa already referred to, Ivon Jones
put it as follows: "Owing to the heavy social disabilities and political backwardness the natives are
not able to supply any active militants to the Communist movement. The immediate needs of white
trade unionism, in which a number of our members are actively engaged, tends to throw the more
difficult task of native emancipation into the background. The white movement dominates our
attention, because the native workers' movement moves only spasmodically, and is neglected. It
6
requires a special department, with native linguists and newspapers. All of which require large
funds, which are not available."
A change in the attitude of the South African Communist Party was brought about as a result of two
interrelated factors. One was the Party's own experience in South Africa, the steady increase of
black membership and influence in its ranks, the deepening co-operation of the Party with black
organisations of various kinds, the growth in militancy and maturity of the black organisations
themselves reflecting the ever-increasing absorption of black labour in the modern sector of the
economy. The second factor was the influence exerted on the South African Party by Comintern
thinking and experience in relation to the national question and, in the late twenties and early
thirties, the specific interchanges between the Comintern and the South African Communist Party
on the way in which the national question should be tackled in South Africa.
The national question featured prominently on the agenda of the Second Comintern congress
which opened in Petrograd on July 17, 1920, and continued in Moscow from July 23 to August 7.
The Congress adopted a number of theses on the national and colonial question drafted by Lenin
but also incorporating supplementary theses comprising an amended version of theses submitted
by the Indian delegate Roy. Lenin pointed out, in his report of the commission on the National and
Colonial Question delivered on June 26, that "the vast majority of the world's population, over
1,000 million, perhaps even 1,250 million, if we take the total population of the world as 1750
million, in other words, about 70 per cent of the world's population, belong to the oppressed
nations." The enormous revolutionary potential of these millions was acknowledged when the
congress decided to substitute the term "national-revolutionary" for the term "bourgeois-
democratic" which had previously been used to define the nature of the national movement.
"The significance of this change", said Lenin, "is that we as Communists, should and will support
bourgeois liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and
when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit
the peasantry and the masses of the exploited".
Another point stressed by Lenin in this same speech was that, thanks to the existence of Soviet
power, it was no longer correct to assume that “the development of capitalist economy is inevitable
in those backward countries which are now liberating themselves and in which progressive
movements have been started since the war... With the assistance of the proletariat of the
advanced countries, the backward nations can arrive to the Soviet form of organisation and
through certain stages pass on to Communism, obviating the capitalist stage."
Lenin's basic thesis as accepted by the congress stated the essential distinction between
bourgeois and proletarian democracy in relation to the national movement: "An abstract or formal
posing of the problem of equality in general and national equality in particular is in the very nature'
of bourgeois democracy. Under the guise of the equality of the individual in general, bourgeois
democracy proclaims the formal or legal equality of the property-owner and the proletarian, the
exploiter and the exploited, thereby grossly deceiving the oppressed classes. On the plea that all
men are absolutely equal, the bourgeoisie is transforming the idea of equality, which is itself a
reflection of relations in commodity production, into a weapon in its struggle against the abolition of
classes. The real meaning of the demand for equality consists in its being a demand for the
abolition of classes."
In other words, there can be no true national equality until class division is ended; only socialism
can create the conditions in which national division and race discrimination can be abolished.
Nevertheless, the forces working for the national democratic revolution and those working for
socialism can, in certain circumstances, co-operate.
Point 4 of the theses on the national question set out the perspectives of the movement as follows:
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"The policy of the Communist International on the National and Colonial questions must be chiefly
to bring about a union of the proletarian and working masses of all nations and countries for a joint
revolutionary struggle leading to the overthrow of capitalism, without which national equality and
oppression cannot be abolished."
The theses distinguished sharply between proletarian internationalism and petty-bourgeois
nationalism. Point 10 of the theses declares: "Petty-bourgeois nationalism proclaims as
internationalism the mere recognition of the equality of nations, and nothing more. Quite apart from
the fact that this recognition is purely verbal, petty-bourgeois nationalism preserves national self-
interest intact, whereas proletarian internationalism demands, first, that the interests of the
proletarian struggle in any one country should be subordinated to the interests of that struggle on a
worldwide scale, and, second, that a nation which has achieved victory over the bourgeoisie should
be able and willing to make the greatest national sacrifices for the overthrow of international
capital."
Point 11 places upon the Communist Parties of all countries the responsibility of assisting the
bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in the more backward countries, and of establishing the
closest possible alliance between the Communist parties of the metropolitan countries and the
revolutionary peasant movements in the colonies and backward countries. And, with profound
foresight, warns: "It is likewise necessary to wage determined war against the attempts of quasi-
revolutionists to cloak the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in the backward countries
with a communist garb . . . The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with
bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and
should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if in its
most embryonic form."
The same section also foresaw the development of neo-colonialism, and urged the need constantly
to explain and expose among the broadest working masses of all countries, and particularly of the
backward countries, the deception systematically practised by the imperialist powers which, under
the guise of politically independent states, set up states that are wholly dependent upon them
economically, financially and militarily"
To the original theses which had been drafted by Lenin were added a number of supplementary
theses submitted by the Indian Communist Roy and accepted, after amendment, by the second
congress of the Comintern. Roy's theses emerged from the experience of Indian Communists in
the liberation movement. In one sense they enriched the thinking of the Comintern on the national
question, but to some extent they also introduced an element of confusion. Roy's main argument
was that the breaking up of the colonial empire, together with the proletarian revolution in the
metropolitan country, would overthrow the capitalist system in Europe. Roy's point six, as accepted
by the congress, stated: "Foreign domination has obstructed the free development of the social
forces, therefore its overthrow is the first step towards a revolution in the colonies. So to help
overthrow the foreign rule in the colonies is not to endorse the nationalist aspirations of the native
bourgeoisie, but to open the way to the smothered proletariat there,"
Roy's point 7 (also as accepted by congress) added:
'There are to be found in the dependent countries two distinct movements, which every day
grow farther apart from each other. One is the democratic nationalist movement, with a programme
of political independence under the bourgeois order, and the other is the mass action of the poor
and ignorant peasants and workers for their liberation from all sorts of exploitation. The former
endeavour to control the latter, and often succeed to a certain extent, but the Communist
International and the (communist) parties affected must struggle against such control and help to
develop class consciousness in the working masses of the colonies. For the overthrow of foreign
capitalism which is the first step towards revolution in the colonies, the co-operation of the
bourgeois nationalist revolutionary elements is useful. But the foremost and necessary task is the
formation of Communist Parties which will organise the peasants and workers and lead them to the
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revolution and to the establishment of Soviet Republics. Thus the masses of the backward
countries may reach communism, not through capitalistic development; but led by the class
conscious proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries."
Roy's theses were based on the experience of the colonial countries which bulked largest in the
thinking of the Comintern - India, China, Indonesia, Northern Africa and the Middle East, Latin
America. In all these countries the national bourgeoisie had developed far further than in South
Africa and most other African countries, and the nature and composition of the national liberation
organisations was also different. Roy's thesis that the movement of the national bourgeoisie was
every day growing further apart from that of the workers and peasants did not, for example, apply
to South Africa, where the very development of a national bourgeoisie was frustrated by the laws of
the dominant white racists; and as the apartheid laws were piled on top of one another, the
incipient black bourgeoisie were more and more thrown back into the arms of the worker and
peasant masses whose deprivation and disabilities they were forced to share.
But the 2nd Congress theses left other issues unclear. Was the national revolution to be led by the
organisations of the oppressed peoples themselves - both the bourgeois national democratic and
the proletarian bodies - or by the proletarian organisations of the metropolitan countries, or by all
acting in collaboration? And who was to provide the leadership? Which was the main force of the
national revolution? Further, was it a one-stage or a two-stage revolution? At what stage did
proletarian co-operation with the national bourgeoisie degenerate into capitulation or tailism?
The theses on the national question remained basically unaltered until the sixth congress of the
Comintern in 1928, when an additional "Thesis on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and
Semi-Colonies" was adopted, based on the experience of the international communist movement
in the intervening years.
In South Africa, the Communist Party made slow progress after its formation in 1921. The early
years were dominated by the 1922 strike and its aftermath, which kept the attention of the Party
focussed on the problems of the white workers. Even this strike, however, revolved around the role
and status of the black workers, and the Party found itself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one
hand it felt obliged, as it stated in a manifesto published in the International on February 3, 1922, to
"offer its assistance to the Strike Committee"', although it stressed that it did this "without
necessarily identifying itself with every slogan heard in this strike". On the other hand, the colour-
bar content of the strike violated the Party's basic policy of equal rights for all, and the Buntingite
wing of the Party especially felt it necessary to defend the black workers from actual or threatened
attack and argued the right of the black workers to attain equal pay and status with the whites. The
pages of the International reflected this ideological confusion. The strike found the Communist
Party theoretically ill-equipped to sort out the tangled issues of principle; but it was at the same
time a powerful educator which brought the Party face to face with the need to formulate a clearer
line on the issues of race and class.
During this period only one African of note, T.W. Thibedi - a veteran from the days of the
International Socialist League - was to be found active in the ranks of the Communist Party.
In his report back from the 4th Congress of the Comintern held in Moscow in 1922, Bunting
indicated something of the stimulus it had given him, reinforcing his own ideas on the way the
movement should develop in South Africa. "An all-negro liberation or anti-imperialist movement
throughout the world", he wrote, "may well be more potent for the victory of our common cause
than anything our mere handful of white workers as such in South Africa can accomplish, and it is
time we realised it and it is also time we acted up to our professions regarding the organisation of
the native workers; we always say it must be done, but we haven't done it. Our hesitation or
passivity in this respect is partly a relic of our Second International origin. As a Communist Party
we are not out merely to make new parry members or even 'conscientious objectors to the
capitalist system', but to mobilise all available forces against capitalism and imperialism, all races
9
of workers, all oppressed peoples".
And he added significanfly in the light of later controversies: "The actual work of organising and
propaganda on a wide scale among the Non-Europeans must be carried out chiefly by Non-
European associations, unions and organisers: in particular they alone can reach the rural
proletariat and peasantry whose support in every country is emphasised by the (Communist
International) Congress as indispensable".
The harder he and his supporters pressed for work to be carried out among the blacks; the more
protests came from the "relics of the Second International" who still retained their membership of
the Communist Party. Typical was a letter from the veteran trade unionist Harry Haynes read out at
a meeting of the Central Executive of the Communist Party in Johannesburg on December 14,
1923, voicing his emphatic objection to the "native policy" of the party being forced down the
throats of the white workers. Haynes proposed that the Communist Party should dissolve itself and
its members join the South African Labour Party as individuals, as he himself proposed to do.
Years later, at a meeting of the Party's Central Executive in Johannesburg on July 7, 1927, the
Party's leading trade union figure W.H. Andrews reported that the attitude of the white workers had
not advanced much.
"The Amalgamated Engineering Union", he said, "the biggest union in the South African Trades
Union Congress [of which Andrews was secretary] had seceded on the ground of the alleged
hobnobbing of the SATUC with the native labour movement and 'communist influence' 9 and the
SATUC had to be very careful to avoid a general stampede. The white trade union movement in
South Africa will not co-operate with the natives". (It is a melancholy reflection on the slowness of
white attitudes to change that 30 years later, in 1966, the AEU seceded from the Trade Union
Congress of South Africa (TUCSA) on roughly similar grounds.)
At the 3rd congress of the Party in Johannesburg in December, 1924, all the delegates present
were white, though three Africans described in the minutes as "visitors" representing the ICU
addressed the conference - T. Mbeki, J.M.K. Sibella and Silwana. Mbeki and Silwana were
members of the Young Communist League and later active members of the CP, but the reports to
the 1924 congress stressed the difficulty the Party had experienced in attracting African members
and establishing enduring contact with African organisations.
Resolutions passed at the conference, however, brought about a pronounced change of direction
in party policy away from the white workers and towards the blacks. The main resolution passed
by the conference was not to apply to the Labour Party for affiliation, as it had done regularly in the
past with a view to securing a united front of the working class. The resolution passed at the
congress suggested that such a united front could not be built from the top, but must come from
mass action at rank and file level. The Party, said the resolution, “stresses the prime importance of
mass organisation of labour . . . It aims at forwarding the industrial organisation of ALL sections of
the workers, especially those hitherto unorganised . . . the problems of the working class can only
be solved by a United Front ef all workers irrespective of colour"
Introducing a report on "Native Affairs" at the congress on December 28, trade unionist W. Kalk
said: "The Communist Party must recognise the necessity of supporting every form of native
movement which tends to undermine or weaken capitalism and imperialism, and must fight for race
equality of the natives on the economic and political field. The Communist Party must use every
instrument which will induce the trade unions to admit native workers. Failing this, it must organise
the natives into unions of their own, and apply United Front tactics
Edward Roux, a leading light in the Young Communist League, presented a supplementary report
most of which was devoted to a discussion of the ICU, which he described as the "most important
factor for the Communist Party in the present situation".
10
Roux added: "The Communist Party has a very definite function to perform in this connection. We
have to fight nationalism just as relentlessly among the natives as among the whites. That means
that, while preserving all the revolutionary spirit of the national movement, we must seek to guide
the native workers into the labour movement i.e. into contact with the white workers politically and
industrially".
In his speech, Silwana commented that the task of the Communist Party was a difficult one. "The
CP has got to prove to the masses that it is different . . . .The natives look upon the whites as one
class and their enemies”.
The Communist Party, as was to be the case often enough in future, came under fire from the side
of both the black and the white nationalists, though obviously not for the same reason.
Following the conference, however, the Africanisation of the Party was speeded up. Black party
members were recruited in greater numbers and played an active role in existing organisations like
the ICU (until Communists were expelled from the organisation in 1926), and the African National
Congress. The Party started an African night school in Johannesburg, founded a number of African
trade unions. Slowly the racial complexion of the Party began to change.
It was not all plain sailing. In the period during and after the second world war, the idea of multi-
racialism, of blacks and whites meeting and discussing together, belonging to the same
organisations, became more widespread, if still anathema to the majority of whites, especially
those in government. But in the twenties, the Communist Party was pioneering, breaking new,
ground, frightening even some of its own members with its audacity. At the 4th Party congress held
in Cape Town in December 1925, the same W. Kalk who had at the previous conference
demanded that the Party fight for equal rights for blacks, complained that some people were
pushing things too far. Speaking in the session held on Christmas Day, December 25, he
protested: "Comrade Roux should not say at public meetings in Johannesburg that natives should
walk on the pavements, etc. That is what causes trouble at the meetings".
The majority of conference delegates, however, stuck to their guns. For the first time, a Communist
Party conference was attended by a number of black delegates - J. Gomas, E.J. Khaile, P. de
Norman - and for the first time a black was elected to the Party's Central Executive - the veteran
T.W. Thibedi, who had been the main African activist for so many years in the Communist Party
and before that in the ISL. He was followed in 1926 by J.A. la Guma, Gana Makabeni and J.
Phahlane, while Jacob Tjelele was elected to the Central Executive in 1927. On June 21st, 1926,
the Central Executive decided that articles in the African languages should be published in the
Party paper, now named the South African Worker, though at the same meeting it was decided,
after a long discussion, that the time was not ripe to appoint an African organiser.
Nevertheless, the Party was getting its roots down.
At the sixth congress of the Comintern in Moscow in August 1928, Bunting was able to inform the
delegates that the Party then had 1,750 members, of whom 1,600 were Africans as against 200 a
year before, "though", he added, "so far the effectiveness, the 'specific gravity' as it were, per head
remains greater among the white members; thus the central executive of the Party, for example,
contains only 3 or 4 native members out of a total of 13 simply for want of more efficient native
comrades available as yet. Responsibility and initiative are not yet highly enough developed among
most of our native membership, and some of our principal energies have for several years been
devoted to the effort to develop them."
There were some among the Party membership who felt that the failure of the blacks to pass the
"specific gravity" test flowed not from their inadequacy but from the wrong policy pursued by the
Party on the national question. One such was James la Guma, a Coloured Party leader from Cape
11
Town who, together with ANC leader J.T. Gumede and TUC representative Daniel Colraine
attended the February 1927 congress of the League against Imperialism in Brussels. Gumede had
told the Brussels conference: "I am happy to say that there are Communists in South Africa. I
myself am not one, but it is my experience that the, Communist Party is the only party that stands
behind us and from which we can expect something".
Shortly after his return, at the ANC conference which opened at Bloemfontein on July 28, 1927,
Gumede expressed his opposition to the expulsion of the Communists from the ICU, and pointed
out "that of all the political parties in the country, the Communist Party was the only one which
honestly and sincerely fought for the emancipation of the oppressed natives". The conference
endorsed his report of the Brussels conference proceedings, elected Gumede its new President-
General and, for good measure, elected E.J. Khaile, a CP member who had been expelled from
the ICU in terms of Kadalie's anti-Communist policy, as ANC general secretary. CP relationships
with the ICU might be strained, but with the ANC at this period they were cordial, especially in the
Cape, where in 1927 la Guma and Gomas were elected respectively secretary and chairman of the
local ANC branch.
Later in the year la Guma and Gumede were invited to visit the Soviet Union, where la Guma had
discussions with Bukharin and other members of the Comintern Executive in Moscow.
On his return to South Africa Gumede proclaimed of his visit to the Soviet Union: "I have seen the
new world to come, where it has already begun. I have been to the new Jerusalem". On February
27, 1928, he attended a meeting of the Central Executive of the Communist Party by special
invitation and reported on his visit to the Soviet Union. Though he never joined the Party, his close
collaboration with it was to provoke the antagonism of the more conservative elements in the ANC
who finally brought about his defeat in the election for President at the 1930 ANC conference.
On March 15,1928, just over two weeks after they had listened to Gumede's enthusiastic report,
the Party's Central Executive heard a report of a somewhat different nature from la Guma, who had
spent some days in Cape Town before following Gumede to Johannesburg. The minutes of the
meeting report la Guma as stressing that "Bukharin had said that the white workers in South Africa,
soaked as they were with imperialist ideology, were not of primary revolutionary importance in this
country"
This same CEC meeting had under discussion a draft "Resolution on the South African Question"
drawn up by the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) in preparation for the sixth
congress of the CI held in Moscow in August and September 1928. The draft contained many of
the ideas placed before the ECCI by la Guma when he was in Moscow.
The main "Thesis on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies" adopted by
the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International dealt with South Africa only in passing,
devoting most of its attention to the world picture as a whole. Emphasising that the theses on the
national and colonial questions drawn up by Lenin and adopted at the second congress were still
valid and should serve as a guiding line for the further work of the Communist Parties, the 6th
congress declared that since the second congress, "the actual significance of the colonies and
semi-colonies, as factors of crisis in the imperialist world system, has vastly increased . . . the vast
colonial and semi-colonial world has become an unquenchable blazing furnace of the revolutionary
mass movement.
"The establishment of a fighting front between the active forces of the socialist world revolution (the
Soviet Union and the revolutionary Labour movement in the capitalist countries) on the one side,
and the forces of imperialism on the other side, is of fundamental importance in the present epoch
of world history. The toiling masses of the colonies struggling against imperialist slavery represent
a most powerful auxiliary force of the socialist world revolution. The colonial countries at the
present time constitute for world imperialism the most dangerous sector of their front".
12
The resolution repeated the judgment of the second congress that "the alliance with the USSR and
with the revolutionary proletariat of the imperialist countries creates for the toiling masses of the
people of China, India and all other colonial and semi-colonial countries, the possibility of an
independent, free, economic and cultural development, avoiding the stage of the domination of the
capitalist system or even the development of capitalist relations in general."
South Africa in this resolution was grouped with three other areas under the general heading "The
Negro Question", the other three being 1. the United States and some South American countries in
which the compact negro masses constitute a minority in relation to the white population; 2 the
negro states which are actually colonies or semi-colonies of irnperialism (Liberia, Haiti, San
Domingo); 3. the whole of Central Africa divided into the colonies and mandated territories of the
various imperialist powers.
The entire section on South Africa, a single paragraph in a 63-page document (and even this
paragraph was missing from the first draft), read as follows: "In the Union of South Africa, the negro
masses, which constitute the majority of the population, are being expropriated from the land by
the white colonists and by the State, are deprived of political rights and of the right of freedom of
movement, are subjected to most brutal forms of racial and class oppression, and suffer
simultaneously from pre-capitalist and capitalist methods of exploitation and oppression. The
Communist Party which has already achieved definite successes among the negro proletariat, has
the duty of continuing still more energetically the struggle for complete equality of rights for the
negroes, for the abolition of all special regulations and laws directed against negroes, and for
confiscation of the land of the landlords. In drawing into its organisation non-negro workers,
organising them in trade unions, and in carrying on a struggle for the acceptance of negroes by 'the
trade unions of white workers, the Communist Party has the obligation to struggle by all methods
against every racial prejudice in the ranks of the white workers and to eradicate entirely such
prejudices from its own tanks. The Party must determinedly and consistently put forward the slogan
for the creati6n of an independent native republic, with simultaneous guarantees for the rights of
the white minority, and struggle in deeds for its realisation. In proportion as the development of
capitalist relationships disintegrates the tribal structure, the Party must strengthen its work in the
education in class-consciousness of the exploited strata of the negro population, and co-operate in
their liberation from the influence of the exploiting tribal strata, which become more and more
agents of imperialism
This was not the resolution discussed at the meeting of the CEC of the South African Party on
March 15, 1928. That was a much longer document discussing in detail the situation in South
Africa and setting out the tasks confronting the Party. This special resolution on South Africa
stated, inter alia: "The Party must orientate itself chiefly upon the native toiling masses while
continuing to work actively among the white workers. The Party leadership must be developed in
the same sense. This can only be achieved by bringing the native membership without delay into
much more active leadership of the Party both locally and centrally.
"While developing and strengthening the fight against all the customs, laws and regulations which
discriminate against the native and coloured population in favour of the white population, the
Communist Party of South Africa must combine the fight against all anti-native laws with the
general political slogan in the fight against British domination, the slogan of an independent native
South African republic as a stage towards a workers' and peasants' republic, with full equal rights
for all races, black, coloured and white.
"South Africa is a black country, the majority of its population is black and so is the majority of the
workers and peasants. The bulk of the South African population is the black peasantry, whose land
has been expropriated by the white minority. Seven eighths of the land is owned by the whites.
Hence the national question in South Africa, which is based upon the agrarian question, lies at the
foundation of the revolution in South Africa. The black peasantry constitutes the basic moving force
13
of the revolution in alliance with and under the leadership of the working class.”
The resolution also stated that "the Party should pay particular attention to The embryonic
organisations among the natives, such as The African National Congress. The Party, while
retaining its full independence, should participate in these organisations, should seek to broaden
and extend their activity. Our aim should be to transform the African National Congress into a
fighting nationalist revolutionary organisation against the white bourgeoisie and the British
imperialists, based upon the trade unions, peasant organisations etc. developing systematically the
leadership of the workers and The Communist Party in this organisation".
The difference between this resolution and the main resolution adopted by the 6th congress is at
once apparent. Whereas the main resolution calls merely for the "creation of an independent native
republic, with simultaneous guarantees for the rights of the white minority", the special resolution
on the South African question called for "an independent native South African republic as a stage
towards a workers' and peasants' republic, with full equal rights for all races, black, coloured and
white".
This addition of a socialist perspective to the slogan on the objectives of the national liberatory
movement reflects the struggle over the "native republic" issue which occurred in the Communist
Party of South Africa from the moment that the first draft was received by them in 1927. In his first
reaction, Bunting reported to the Comintern that "at our party conference at the end of 1927 the
proposal had a mixed reception", and it was resolved to defer discussion until after Ia Guma and
Gumede had returned from Europe. But in the course of setting out his preliminary objections to
the "native republic" slogan, Bunting provided one explanation of why the majority of the South
African CP members were lagging in their approach to the national question.
"The basis claimed for the slogan", said Bunting, "is no doubt Lenin's famous thesis on colonial
affairs adopted at The Second Congress of the CI in 1920. Unfortunately it has been impossible to
obtain a copy of this thesis to refer to” (My italics.) Bunting added that his sole knowledge of the
thesis was derived from quotations which -"are believed to be correct" - presumably incorporated in
the work of other writers. It is as well to bear in mind that, although Marxist writings were slowly
spreading through the colonial world, the South African Party appears to have been framing its
policies on the national question without full access to the vital discussions which had been going
on in the Comintern for the previous seven years.
At any rate, when the slogan was formally discussed at that CEC meeting in Johannesburg on
March 15, 1928, the ECCI's draft was supported in discussion by la Guma, Douglas Wolton and his
wife Molly, but opposed by V. Danchin, E.S. Sachs, B. Weibren, Gana Makabeni and Thibedi, who
dubbed it "Garveyism" and racialistic. According to the minutes, even Wolton admitted that the
thesis was open to misunderstanding and that its acceptance at that stage would endanger the
party.
The main protagonists in the argument, Bunting and Wolton, presented statements of their views at
the meeting of the CEC held on May 10, 1928. Bunting's statement opposing the ECCI's draft was
supported by 8 votes to 2 but it was decided that both the majority and minority reports should be
sent to the Communist International. At an earlier meeting on May 3, when it came to choosing
between Bunting and Wolton to represent South Africa at the 6th congress, the CEC split 4 - 4, but
at a later meeting on May 3, Bunting was elected by 6 votes to 3. It was also decided to send as a
delegate E.R. Roux, who was then a student at Cambridge University in England and who had
been prominent in the foundation and development of the Young Communist League in
Johannesburg before he went overseas. It was also agreed that Rebecca Bunting, who was a
member of the CEC and planned to accompany her husband to Moscow, should also be a
delegate.
The differences between the majority and minority reports are instructive. Bunting's 30-page
14
statement reflects his detailed knowledge of the political movement in South Africa, based on years
of painstaking work up and down the Witwatersrand and in country areas of the Transvaal, carrying
the Communist Party flag into practically every African township and location. The "native republic"
slogan, he said, would have a negative effect on both black and white in South Africa.
"The policy of the CP in South Africa has always been to split the whites on class lines and stress
the fundamental community of interest of white proletarians and semi-proletarians with the blacks -
we could not agree to any weakening or abandonment of this policy, and we therefore quarrel
somewhat with the wording of the resolution where it says that there will be an ever sharper
'division of interests between the black and white population', i.e. treated as one whole, without
class discrimination"'.
The idea of white and black comradeship against the ruling class had been a genuine inspiration to
the blacks, especially in the rural areas, "and the demand for visits from white speakers (among
others) is continuous, so great is the contrast they present with the usual white arrogance on the
one hand and ICU avarice and fire-eating on the other".
Bunting's main argument was that it was through the class struggle, and the achievement of
socialism under the leadership of the Communist Party that national liberation and the ending of all
forms of national and race discrimination and oppression could be achieved.
"The class banner is in fact today inspiring more revolutionary enthusiasm than the racial banner",
he said, citing as an example the action of tailoring workers in Germiston where 300 white girls and
100 native men had gone out on strike together. "For the first time in history, we believe, whites
and natives have come out on strike together on the Rand . . . This co-operation is our work. It is
making reactionary trade unionists think seriously"
(During 1928 the two racially separate tailoring workers' unions, one black and one white, were
amalgamated into one union, and Bunting was able to claim in his speech to the 1928 Comintern
congress that this historic achievement was testimony to the soundness of the Party's line on the
national question.)
Bunting's report stated that he had no confidence in the national movement.
"Although the indignation at 'white' oppression, as indeed the oppression itself, is growing, yet in
our view the' strictly nationalist stage of native consciousness, in as far as it ever existed in that
form, is not a growing force but a declining one; it is being played out, as in other countries such as
China, in favour of the class movement (witness the early popularity of the ICU as compared with
the Congress); and the attempt to revive it or create it would be to strive against nature and
history.”
There was no native bourgeoisie in South Africa to spearhead a national democratic revolution.
The Africans were "all helotised together".
"As our first leaflet on native unity said in 1918 'Let there be no Zulu, Basuto or Shangaan; unite as
workers, unite!' and this leaflet had an enormous influence in South Africa, and from its slogan
originated the whole South African native labour movement, including the ICU,'. Indeed, the ICU,
said Bunting, "has a greater expectation of life than the ANC because its foundation is class rather
than race unity".
Bunting's failure to appreciate the revolutionary potential of the national movement was reflected in
his discussion of the strategy and tactics open to the movement.
"We cannot see much hope of success for an armed native rising for the present", his statement
said. "The main weapons available to the SA Natives today are still only agitation, demonstration,
15
continual pressure of protest on the Government, continual confrontation of it with publication of
facts which no ruling class dare defend, strikes, boycotts, elections etc. all aiming at a certain
paralysation of the will of the ruling class to persist in its unblushing and brutal oppression in face
of nation-wide outcry and resistance
To the battle-hardened revolutionaries at the 6th Congress in Moscow, this line must have seemed
little better than reformism. By contrast, Wolton's 14-page statement, though disclosing far less
acquaintance with the practical problems of organisation and action in South Africa
(understandable perhaps since he had come to South Africa from England only in 1921, and had
been involved in Communist Party politics for an even shorter period) had a revolutionary content
which was lacking in the majority statement National movements in colonial and semi-colonial
countries are of paramount importance, for "national independence is incompatible with world
imperialism", he said.
"The levelling process of capitalist economics is proceeding; the native worker is swamping the
industrial life of the country; today, the unskilled spheres, but tomorrow the skilled spheres also...”
He quoted official figures that 300,000 Africans were permanently urbanised, "completely
proletarianised".
"It becomes increasingly clear that as the mass of native workers advance to the struggle, the
white workers function proportionately less as a revolutionary factor in the class struggle in South
Africa".
Black unity was important in the struggle against white domination. "The common helotry of all
Non-Europeans is sufficient assurance of the ultimate complete unity between Native, Malay,
Coloured and Indian.
"The slogan of a South African Native Republic is clearly a challenging cry from the vast majority of
the proletariat to sweep away the privileged minority positions occupied by the white workers with
the added addendum that they (the white workers) shall take their just and equal stand in The
working class movement as a whole. The call to the native proletariat as embodied in the slogan
will give birth to a sense of power as a national class unit'
While conceding Bunting's criticism of the ANC as having "no very definite policy or activity, either
political or economic, at the moment", Wolton added: "Nevertheless it has always remained dimly
as an expression at least of the desire of the African people to bontrol their own destinies". ANC
activities "reveal a conscious desire of the African people to one day possess power and constitute
a very strong national expression of the people towards independent action".'
As for the ICU, whereas Bunting had seen it as originating in the desire for class rather than
national unity, Wolton held that "the main-spring of its astounding development was its appeal to
the national sentiments of the African people". The ICU organ Worker's Herald, he pointed out,
bore the slogan "Your own paper, devoted to your own interests, in your own languages".
The CP majority were wrong to place their faith in working class unity, said Wolton. "Effective unity
between black and white worker cannot be contemplated seriously until power is in the hands of
the working class in this country". It was native mass organisation which would win the white
workers' respect and possible neutrality or even support
Bunting had held that the "native republic" slogan would automatically antagonise all whites,
including the workers, and could lead only to a racial war which would indefinitely postpone the
socialist revolution. This did not dismay Wolton.
"A so-called racial war", he said, "could never mean anything else than a struggle led by the
industrial proletariat for liberation from white domination, from white control of the means of life,
16
mines, factories land etc. and as such, the struggle, by whatever 'unpopular' name it may be called,
must be supported and fostered by the revolutionary movemenf'
Wolton also placed The South African revolution firmly in its international context, and emphasised
the importance of the native republic slogan for the anti-imperialist movement in the whole African
continent.
At the sixth congress of the CI, the South African majority view, as reflected in Bunting's statement,
was, of course, in the minority; whereas the minority view expounded in Wolton's report coincided
with the view of the congress as a whole. In an attempt to reach a compromise, the South African
delegation proposed through Bunting an amendment to the "native republic" slogan reading: "an
independent workers' and peasants' South African republic with equal rights for all toilers irre-
spective of colour, as a basis for a native government". But this, too, proved unacceptable, and the
slogan was finally adopted in the form set out in the resolution adopted by the Executive
Committee of the Comintern and published in the Communist International, Vol. VI, No.2, of
December 15, 1928.
An interesting sidelight on the 6th congress is that in his speech on August 16, E.R. Roux
presented a view of The South African situation which in one respect strikingly anticipates the
programme adopted by the South African Communist Party at its fifth national conference in 1962.
Roux said: "We can regard South Africa as a miniature edition of the British Empire. Here we have
a white bourgeoisie and a white aristocracy of labour living in the same country together with an
exploited colonial working class and also an exploited colonial peasantry. Here the participation of
the workers of the ruling class in the exploitation of the colonial workers is very apparent. That
does not mean that the British workers do not share in the exploitation of the Indian workers, but on
an international field it does not become so obvious as when the exploitation occurs in the confines
of a single country as it does in South Africa".
A similar concept was incorporated in the 1962 programme of the SACP which described South
Africa as a country based on "colonialism of a special type" in which "the oppressing white nation
occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them".
But there the similarity ends. While Roux stressed the class factor; the SACP in 1962 placed the
emphasis on the national revolution.
Roux asked: "Must The Communist Party stress in its propaganda the parasitical nature of the
white workers, even the poor and unemployed whites? Must it stress the parasitical nature of the
British workers as sharers in the exploitation of the Indians? No. Rather you would say, we should
stress the unity of the workers irrespective of colour, in an attack upon capitalism”.
The SACP programme of 1962 also stressed that "the fundamental interests of all South African
workers, like those of workers everywhere, lie in unity: unity in the struggle for the day-to-day
interests of the working class, for the ending of race discrimination and division, for a free,
democratic South Africa as the only possible basis for the winning of socialism, the overthrow of
the capitalist class and the ending of human exploitation
But, it went on, "only the complete emancipation of the non-white peoples can create conditions of
equality and friendship among the nationalities of South Africa and eliminate the roots of race
hatred and antagonism which are the greatest threat to the continued security and existence of the
white population itself. The national liberation of the non-whites which will break the power of
monopoly capitalism is thus in the deepest interest of the bulk of the whites. Progressive and far-
seeing whites ally themselves unconditionally with the struggle of the masses of the people for
freedom and equality.... The immediate and imperative interests of all sections of the South African
people demand . . . a national democratic revolution which will overthrow the colonialist state of
white supremacy and establish an independent state of national democracy in South Africa. The
17
main content of this revolution is the national liberation of the African people."
The resolution on the South African question adopted by the 6th Congress of the Comintern in
1928 laid the theoretical foundation for the work of the Communist Party of South Africa in the
ensuing decades and its importance cannot be overemphasised. At the same time, the immediate
consequence was a period of confusion and uncertainty in the ranks of the Communist Party.
Although the majority of the members of the Communist Party Central Executive had supported
Bunting's statement, they now found themselves bound by point 16 of the 21 points concerning the
conditions of admission to the Comintern, which stated in part: "All the resolutions of the
congresses of the Communist International as well as the resolutions of the Executive Committee
are binding for all parties joining the Communist International".
After he had left the Party, Roux was at pains to make out that the Native Republic resolution was
imposed on The South African Communist Party from outside by a Comintern concerned more with
the furtherance of its own interests and those of its biggest constituent element the Russian CP
than with the interests of the South African people. This is to misunderstand both the constitutional
and the fraternal relationship between the Comintern and its constituent parts. True, the executive
of the South African CP had voted for the Bunting statement, while the Comintem had endorsed
what might be described as an elaborated version of the Wolton line. But the eventual Native
Republic resolution flowed from an interchange of views between the Comintern and the CPSA,
and was accepted in South Africa in terms of the policy of democratic centralism on which the
international Communist movement was based. Certainly, there is no doubting that the impetus for
the Native Republic resolution came from the nationally-minded elements in the South African CP,
as indicated in correspondence between la Guma and the Executive Committee of the Comintern
before the 1928 Congress of the CI.
In a report sent to The ECCI in December 1927, la Guma wrote: "The resolution on South Africa
submitted by the ECCI had not received the approval of the Central Executive. Judging from the
arguments advanced against the resolution 'that it was drawn up by people with insufficient
knowledge of South African affairs', especially the extreme backwardness and widespread apathy
of the native masses; that they are such easy prey to rogues and charlatans that they will make a
mess of it; that the white worker after all has the first say in such questions etc. etc . . . it is easily
seen that the boot is on the other foot, since these arguments are abundantly refuted by everyday
facts..."
After citing examples of growing militancy and strike action on the part of the blacks in South
Africa, la Guma went on: "The argument that the movement depends to a large extent if not solely
upon the European workers does not carry much weight if we bear in mind the opposition on the
part of the rank and file European labour to co-operation with Blacks, and their further realisation
that their privileges and concessions are obtained at the expense of the Black workers.
"These arguments drive the non-European comrades to the conclusion that the Central Executive
of the South African Party considers the mass movement of the natives should be held up until
such time as the white worker is ready to extend his favour. Needless to say, the entire non-
European membership of the Cape Town branch and all Europeans, with one exception heard so
far, are for The ECCI resolution . . .
Once the Comintern Congress had taken its decision, the South African Communist Party, as a
constituent element, voted to accept it A report dated September 20, 1929, drawn up by Wolton as
secretary of the CPSA for submission to the Comintern described the proceedings of the 7th
annual conference of the CPSA held earlier in the year. There were 18 native delegates and 10
white, representing an aggregate membership of 3,000 of whom only 300, however, were in
financial standing. The report states: "During the discussion on the CI resolution, which lasted for a
whole day, practically all the delegates participated. The whites for the most part opposed the
resolution, partly through unclear understanding and the rest through a social democratic outlook.
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The native delegates, whilst not following all the intellectual hairsplitting of some of the white
delegates, supported the resolution on race grounds. Ultimately the resolution was put, and only
four votes were cast against . . . Since the conference it can be said that some of those against the
resolution have come over and now support the Party line."
Superficially, the unity of the Party was maintained. Bunting and most of the adherents of the
former majority line accepted the decision of the 6th congress and loyally carried it out. Bunting
was elected chairman of the Party executive and Wolton secretary, with an African Albert Nzula as
assistant secretary. Bunting and Wolton both stood as party candidates in the 1929 general
election, Bunting getting 289 votes in Tembuland and Wolton 93 in the Cape Flats. Both had
placed the "independent native republic" slogan at the heart of their appeal to the electorate.
But beneath the surface, personal antagonism between Bunting and Wolton and their supporters,
as well as ideological confusion continued. Wolton himself, in his report on the 1929 congress, was
to show that lack of clarity about the relationship between the class and national struggles was not
confined to the "Buntingites". Referring to the white trade unions in which CP members were
active, he said: "It is in this section of Party work that the right wing danger reveals itself most
clearly, when under spurious slogans of unity of black and white workers, the revolutionary workers
tend to lose their independence and become an appendage of the reformist machine."
Spurious slogans? Yet the ECCI resolution on the South African question had urged: "The
Communist Party must continue to struggle for unity between black and white workers.... It must
explain to the native masses that the black and white workers are .not only allies, but are the
leaders of the revolutionary struggle of the native masses against the white bourgeoisie and British
imperialism
There was also confusion over the meaning of "independent native republic" and "national
movement". Recalling Stalin's definition of a nation as "a historically evolved, stable community of
language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of
culture", party members argued about its application in South Africa. Was there a single African
nation, or were there a number of distinct nations (Xhosa, Zulu, Shangaan etc.)? Was a national
group or a tribe the same thing as a nation? The extent to which confusion existed in party circles
may be gauged from the fact that as late as December 1931, at a meeting of the Central
Committee of the CPSA in Johannesburg, Molly Wolton proposed "The substitution of our slogan
Federation of Independent Native Republics for The previous slogan of a South African
Independent Native Republic". She went on to explain: "Analysing the work of the Party and the
conditions in South Africa, it was felt by the Communist International that an independent Native
Republic as applied to South Africa where we have various tribes with different languages, different
traditions and customs and to a certain extent different culture, would not meet the situation and
therefore the CI discussed this question very fully and very exhaustively and came to the
conclusion that in order to ensure a greater unity between the exploited and oppressed people in
South Africa in their fight for national independence and land and against imperialism it was
necessary that the various tribes in this country should have a full understanding of what a South
African Republic would mean; whether it would mean the domination of one tribe by another,
whether it would mean that the Zulus would be the dominating people in the SA Native Republic or
whether another tribe . . .”
The slogan of a Federation of Independent Native Republics, she said, was based on the
experience of the Soviet Union, which had more tribes than South Africa, and which had shown
that only in this way could the Communist Party gain the confidence of the masses. "We must
show them that we have no intention of imposing on any one tribe, but instead grant them
independence and even fight for their independence". Only by working for a Federation of
Independent Native Republics could the CP gain "the fullest unity of all native tribes living in South
Africa to fight against imperialism"
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The new slogan was argued over by the delegates at the Central Committee meeting. Edwin
Mofutsanyana and John Gomas supported it, Nchie opposed it - supporters and opponents cut
across colour lines; but eventually it was adopted as official South African Party policy, until the
threat of fascism and war in the later thirties swept the whole Native Republic issue into the,
background and placed the burning need to form an anti-fascist, anti-war united front at the top of
the Party agenda.
Even during the war, however, echoes of The Native Republic controversy continued to be heard.
Writing on "The National Question in the Soviet Union" in the CP organ Freedom/Vryheid dated
November 7, 1940, Moses Kotane maintained that, just as in the Soviet Union, the national
problem in South Africa would be solved under socialism.
"Socialism will bring Non-Europeans political freedom, and economic and social development", he
wrote. "It will do away with economic competition and fear by making it possible for everybody to
get a job.
"There are predominantly African areas where, with the addition of more land, African republics
may be set up. Industries could be established in those areas, agriculture put on an economic
footing; towns, schools and training institutions built".
This raised again the question of whether there was one African nation or many, and Kotane
referred to the problem of language.
"The language question would form one of the main difficulties. There is no one language which is
sufficiently known and spoken by a majority of the people of Africa. Zulu is spoken mainly in Natal;
Xhosa in the Eastern Cape; Sutho in Basutoland and in some parts of the Free State; Tswana in
Bechuanaland, western and north-western Transvaal, in some parts of the Cape, and in some
parts of the Free State. And then there are Sepedi, Tshivenda and Shangaan in the eastern and
the northern Transvaal. Neither English or Afrikaans is widely spoken among Africans.
"So, while in each republic or national area everything would be conducted in the language of its
people, there still remains the problem of the official national language to be solved. Nevertheless,
this could be settled by the common consent of all".
It is significant to bear in mind, in this context, that the language in which proceedings have been
conducted at all national conferences of the African National Congress has been English, with
translations into Sechuana or Sesutu and Zulu or Xhosa.
One African nation or many? One "Native Republic" or several? It is perhaps unfortunate that
argument over the Comintern's 1928 resolution on the South African question should have centred
on the Native Republic slogan. As an attempt to characterise the nature of the state which would
emerge from the national democratic revolution, the slogan was misleading and perhaps
premature. Above all, the Native Republic slogan did not adequately embody the main content of
the resolution, which was to stress that the Communist Party of South Africa had to study and
apply the correct Marxist-Leninist policies on the national question, and to understand the
revolutionary potential of the national liberation movement led by the national organisations of the
oppressed black majority. In this sense, though the Native Republic slogan may have disappeared
from view in the course of time, the 1928 resolution brought about a permanent and beneficial
change in Communist thinking and practice on the national question, paving the way ultimately for
the tremendous advances registered by both the Party and the liberation movement in later
decades.
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